The Russian top diplomat says the US' attempts to lower the threshold of using nuclear weapons cause Moscow’s alarm

MOSCOW, April 5. /TASS/. The United States’ attempts to lower the threshold of using nuclear weapons cause Moscow’s alarm, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the Moscow Conference on International Security on Thursday.

"The US policy of lowering the threshold of using nuclear weapons causes the deepest concern," he said.

"There have been speculations about spreading within NATO’s framework Article 5 of the Washington Treaty to the problems emerging in cyberspace," Lavrov said. "While persistent calls for starting a professional discussion on confidence building measures and resistance to threats in that field fail to draw positive response either from Washington or from Brussels."

Lavrov also said that "in the sphere of strategic stability Washington attaches priority to gaining military supremacy and upsetting parity," he said pointing to the North Atlantic alliance’s growing military activity near Russian borders and also further efforts to deploy missile defense systems.

Western countries should realize that they will no longer be able to play the ‘one goal game’ on the international scene, he added.

"The West should finally realize that they will no longer be able to play the ‘one goal game,’ that there are no prospects for them to seek to achieve unilateral advantages at our expense and that security in the Euro-Atlantics, in the Asia-Pacific region and in the world as a whole should be equal and indivisible," the Russian foreign minister said.

"[We] are not interested either in confrontation or in setting off an arms race. But Russia will safeguard purposefully and effectively its interests, its sovereignty and independence, using the entire arsenal of tools available to us. Vladimir Putin numerously spoke about this, including in his State of the Nation Address to the Federal Assembly on March 1 this year," Lavrov said.